Viruses of the Mind by R.dawkins

8/13/2019 Viruses of the Mind by R.dawkins

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Viruses of the Mind

Richard Dawkins

1991

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a

human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human

brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes. The avenues for

entry and departure are modified to suit local conditions, and

strengthened by various artificial devices that enhance fidelity and

prolixity of replication: native Chinese minds differ dramatically from

native French minds, and literate minds differ from illiterate minds.

What memes provide in return to the organisms in which they reside is

an incalculable store of advantages with some Tro!an horses thrown

in for good measure. . .

"aniel "ennett, Consciousness Explained

1 Duplication Fodder

# beautiful child close to me, six and the apple of her father$s eye, believes that Thomas

the Tank %ngine really exists. &he believes in Father Christmas, and when she grows up

her ambition is to be a tooth fairy. &he and her schoolfriends believe the solemn word

of respected adults that tooth fairies and Father Christmas really exist. This little girl is

of an age to believe whatever you tell her. 'f you tell her about witches changing princesinto frogs she will believe you. 'f you tell her that bad children roast forever in hell she

will have nightmares. ' have !ust discovered that without her father$s consent this sweet,

trusting, gullible sixyearold is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a (oman Catholic

nun. What chance has she)

# human child is shaped by evolution to soak up the culture of her people. *ost

obviously, she learns the essentials of their language in a matter of months. # large

dictionary of words to speak, an encyclopedia of information to speak about,

complicated syntactic and semantic rules to order the speaking, are all transferred from

older brains into hers well before she reaches half her adult si+e. When you are pre

programmed to absorb useful information at a high rate, it is hard to shut out perniciousor damaging information at the same time. With so many mindbytes to be downloaded,

so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible,

open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to *oonies,

&cientologists and nuns. ike immunedeficient patients, children are wide open to

mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.

"-#, too, includes parasitic code. Cellular machinery is extremely good at copying

"-#. Where "-# is concerned, it seems to have an eagerness to copy, seems eager to

be copied. The cell nucleus is a paradise for "-#, humming with sophisticated, fast,

and accurate duplicating machinery.
http://var/www/apps/conversion/tmp/scratch_6/http://var/www/apps/conversion/tmp/scratch_6/


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Cellular machinery is so friendly towards "-# duplication that it is small wonder cells

play host to "-# parasites viruses, viroids, plasmids and a riffraff of other genetic

fellow travelers. arasitic "-# even gets itself spliced seamlessly into the

chromosomes themselves. //0umping genes$$ and stretches of //selfish "-#$$ cut or copy

themselves out of chromosomes and paste themselves in elsewhere. "eadly oncogenes

are almost impossible to distinguish from the legitimate genes between which they arespliced. 'n evolutionary time, there is probably a continual traffic from //straight$$ genes

to //outlaw,$$ and back again 1"awkins, 23456. "-# is !ust "-#. The only thing that

distinguishes viral "-# from host "-# is its expected method of passing into future

generations. //egitimate$$ host "-# is !ust "-# that aspires to pass into the next

generation via the orthodox route of sperm or egg. //7utlaw$$ or parasitic "-# is !ust

"-# that looks to a 8uicker, less cooperative route to the future, via a s8uee+ed droplet

or a smear of blood, rather than via a sperm or egg.

For data on a floppy disc, a computer is a humming paradise !ust as cell nuclei hum

with eagerness to duplicate "-#. Computers and their associated disc and tape readers

are designed with high fidelity in mind. #s with "-# molecules, magneti+ed bytesdon$t literally //want$$ to be faithfully copied. -evertheless, you can write a computer

program that takes steps to duplicate itself. -ot !ust duplicate itself within one computer

but spread itself to other computers. Computers are so good at copying bytes, and so

good at faithfully obeying the instructions contained in those bytes, that they are sitting

ducks to selfreplicating programs: wide open to subversion by software parasites. #ny

cynic familiar with the theory of selfish genes and memes would have known that

modern personal computers, with their promiscuous traffic of floppy discs and email

links, were !ust asking for trouble. The only surprising thing about the current epidemic

of computer viruses is that it has been so long in coming.

2 Computer Viruses: a Model for an Informational

Epidemiolo!

Computer viruses are pieces of code that graft themselves into existing, legitimate

programs and subvert the normal actions of those programs. They may travel on

exchanged floppy disks, or over networks. They are technically distinguished from

//worms$$ which are whole programs in their own right, usually traveling over networks.

(ather different are //Tro!an horses,$$ a third category of destructive programs, which

are not in themselves selfreplicating but rely on humans to replicate them because of

their pornographic or otherwise appealing content. 9oth viruses and worms areprograms that actually say, in computer language, //"uplicate me.$$ 9oth may do other

things that make their presence felt and perhaps satisfy the holeincorner vanity of their

authors. These sideeffects may be //humorous$$ 1like the virus that makes the

*acintosh$s builtin loudspeaker enunciate the words //"on$t panic,$$ with predictably

opposite effect6 malicious 1like the numerous '9* viruses that erase the hard disk after

a sniggering screenannouncement of the impending disaster6 political 1like the &panish

Telecom and 9ei!ing viruses that protest about telephone costs and massacred students

respectively6 or simply inadvertent 1the programmer is incompetent to handle the low

level system calls re8uired to write an effective virus or worm6. The famous 'nternet

Worm, which paraly+ed much of the computing power of the ;nited &tates on

-ovember 5, 2344, was not intended 1very6 maliciously but got out of control and,


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within 5< hours, had clogged around =,>>> computer memories with exponentially

multiplying copies of itself.

//*emes now spread around the world at the speed of light, and replicate at rates that

make even fruit flies and yeast cells look glacial in comparison. They leap

promiscuously from vehicle to vehicle, and from medium to medium, and are proving tobe virtually un8uarantinable$$ 1"ennett 233>, p.2?26. @iruses aren$t limited to electronic

media such as disks and data lines. 7n its way from one computer to another, a virus

may pass through printing ink, light rays in a human lens, optic nerve impulses and

finger muscle contractions. # computer fanciers$ maga+ine that printed the text of a

virus program for the interest of its readers has been widely condemned. 'ndeed, such is

the appeal of the virus idea to a certain kind of puerile mentality 1the masculine gender

is used advisedly6, that publication of any kind of //how to$$ information on designing

virus programs is rightly seen as an irresponsible act.

' am not going to publish any virus code. 9ut there are certain tricks of effective virus

design that are sufficiently well known, even obvious, that it will do no harm to mentionthem, as ' need to do to develop my theme. They all stem from the virus$s need to evade

detection while it is spreading.

# virus that clones itself too prolifically within one computer will soon be detected

because the symptoms of clogging will become too obvious to ignore. For this reason

many virus programs check, before infecting a system, to make sure that they are not

already on that system. 'ncidentally, this opens the way for a defense against viruses

that is analogous to immuni+ation. 'n the days before a specific antivirus program was

available, ' myself responded to an early infection of my own hard disk by means of a

crude //vaccination.$$ 'nstead of deleting the virus that ' had detected, ' simply disabled

its coded instructions, leaving the //shell$$ of the virus with its characteristic external

//signature$$ intact. 'n theory, subse8uent members of the same virus species that arrived

in my system should have recogni+ed the signature of their own kind and refrained from

trying to doubleinfect. ' don$t know whether this immuni+ation really worked, but in

those days it probably was worth while //gutting$$ a virus and leaving a shell like this,

rather than simply removing it lock, stock and barrel. -owadays it is better to hand the

problem over to one of the professionally written antivirus programs.

# virus that is too virulent will be rapidly detected and scotched. # virus that instantly

and catastrophically sabotages every computer in which it finds itself will not find itself

in many computers. 't may have a most amusing effect on one computer erase anentire doctoral thesis or something e8ually sidesplitting but it won$t spread as an

epidemic.

&ome viruses, therefore, are designed to have an effect that is small enough to be

difficult to detect, but which may nevertheless be extremely damaging. There is one

type, which, instead of erasing disk sectors wholesale, attacks only spreadsheets,

making a few random changes in the 1usually financial6 8uantities entered in the rows

and columns. 7ther viruses evade detection by being triggered probabilistically, for

example erasing only one in 2= of the hard disks infected. Aet other viruses employ the

timebomb principle. *ost modern computers are //aware$$ of the date, and viruses have

been triggered to manifest themselves all around the world, on a particular date such asFriday 2?th or #pril Fool$s "ay. From the parasitic point of view, it doesn$t matter how


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catastrophic the eventual attack is, provided the virus has had plenty of opportunity to

spread first 1a disturbing analogy to the *edawarBWilliams theory of ageing: we are the

victims of lethal and sublethal genes that mature only after we have had plenty of time

to reproduce 1Williams, 23D66. 'n defense, some large companies go so far as to set

aside one //miner$s canary$$ among their fleet of computers, and advance its internal

calendar a week so that any timebomb viruses will reveal themselves prematurelybefore the big day.

#gain predictably, the epidemic of computer viruses has triggered an arms race. #nti

viral software is doing a roaring trade. These antidote programs //'nterferon,$$

//@accine,$$ //Eatekeeper$$ and others employ a diverse armory of tricks. &ome are

written with specific, known and named viruses in mind. 7thers intercept any attempt to

meddle with sensitive system areas of memory and warn the user.

The virus principle could, in theory, be used for nonmalicious, even beneficial

purposes. Thimbleby 123326 coins the phrase //liveware$$ for his alreadyimplemented

use of the infection principle for keeping multiple copies of databases up to date. %verytime a disk containing the database is plugged into a computer, it looks to see whether

there is already another copy present on the local hard disk. 'f there is, each copy is

updated in the light of the other. &o, with a bit of luck, it doesn$t matter which member

of a circle of colleagues enters, say, a new bibliographical citation on his personal disk.

is newly entered information will readily infect the disks of his colleagues 1because

the colleagues promiscuously insert their disks into one another$s computers6 and will

spread like an epidemic around the circle. Thimbleby$s liveware is not entirely virus

like: it could not spread to !ust anybody$s computer and do damage. 't spreads data only

to alreadyexisting copies of its own database and you will not be infected by liveware

unless you positively opt for infection.

'ncidentally, Thimbleby, who is much concerned with the virus menace, points out that

you can gain some protection by using computer systems that other people don$t use.

The usual !ustification for purchasing today$s numerically dominant computer is simply

and solely that it isnumerically dominant. #lmost every knowledgeable person agrees

that, in terms of 8uality and especially userfriendliness, the rival, minority system is

superior. -evertheless, ubi8uity is held to be good in itself, sufficient to outweigh sheer

8uality. 9uy the same 1albeit inferior6 computer as your colleagues, the argument goes,

and you$ll be able to benefit from shared software, and from a generally large circulation

of available software. The irony is that, with the advent of the virus plague, //benefit$$ is

not all that you are likely to get. -ot only should we all be very hesitant before weaccept a disk from a colleague. We should also be aware that, if we !oin a large

community of users of a particular make of computer, we are also !oining a large

community of viruses even, it turns out, disproportionatelylarger.

(eturning to possible uses of viruses for positive purposes, there are proposals to

exploit the //poacher turned gamekeeper$$ principle, and //set a thief to catch a thief.$$ #

simple way would be to take any of the existing antiviral programs and load it, as a

//warhead,$$ into a harmless selfreplicating virus. From a //public health$$ point of view,

a spreading epidemic of antiviral software could be especially beneficial because the

computers most vulnerable to malicious viruses those whose owners are

promiscuous in the exchange of pirated programs will also be most vulnerable toinfection by the healing antivirus. # more penetrating antivirus might as in the
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immune system //learn$$ or //evolve$$ an improved capacity to attack whatever viruses

it encountered.

' can imagine other uses of the computer virus principle which, if not exactly altruistic,

are at least constructive enough to escape the charge of pure vandalism. # computer

company might wish to do market research on the habits of its customers, with a view toimproving the design of future products. "o users like to choose files by pictorial icon,

or do they opt to display them by textual name only) ow deeply do people nest folders

1directories6 within one another) "o people settle down for a long session with only one

program, say a word processors, or are they constantly switching back and forth, say

between writing and drawing programs) "o people succeed in moving the mouse

pointer straight to the target, or do they meander around in timewasting hunting

movements that could be rectified by a change in design)

The company could send out a 8uestionnaire asking all these 8uestions, but the

customers that replied would be a biased sample and, in any case, their own assessment

of their computerusing behavior might be inaccurate. # better solution would be amarketresearch computer program. Customers would be asked to load this program

into their system where it would unobtrusively sit, 8uietly monitoring and tallying key

presses and mouse movements. #t the end of a year, the customer would be asked to

send in the disk file containing all the tallyings of the marketresearch program. 9ut

again, most people would not bother to cooperate and some might see it as an invasion

of privacy and of their disk space.

The perfect solution, from the company$s point of view, would be a virus. ike any

other virus, it would be selfreplicating and secretive. 9ut it would not be destructive or

facetious like an ordinary virus. #long with its selfreplicating booster it would contain

a marketresearch warhead. The virus would be released surreptitiously into the

community of computer users. 0ust like an ordinary virus it would spread around, as

people passed floppy disks and email around the community. #s the virus spread from

computer to computer, it would build up statistics on users behavior, monitored secretly

from deep within a succession of systems. %very now and again, a copy of the viruses

would happen to find its way, by normal epidemic traffic, back into one of the

company$s own computers. There it would be debriefed and its data collated with data

from other copies of the virus that had come //home.$$

ooking into the future, it is not fanciful to imagine a time when viruses, both bad and

good, have become so ubi8uitous that we could speak of an ecological community ofviruses and legitimate programs coexisting in the silicosphere. #t present, software is

advertised as, say, //Compatible with &ystem D.$$ 'n the future, products may be

advertised as //Compatible with all viruses registered in the 2334 World @irus Census

immune to all listed virulent viruses takes full advantage of the facilities offered by the

following benign viruses if present...$$ Wordprocessing software, say, may hand over

particular functions, such as wordcounting and stringsearches, to friendly viruses

burrowing autonomously through the text.

ooking even further into the future, whole integrated software systems might grow, not

by design, but by something like the growth of an ecological community such as a

tropical rainforest. Eangs of mutually compatible viruses might grow up, in the sameway as genomes can be regarded as gangs of mutually compatible genes 1"awkins,


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23456. 'ndeed, ' have even suggested that our genomes should be regarded as gigantic

colonies of viruses 1"awkins, 23D=6. Eenes cooperate with one another in genomes

because natural selection has favored those genes that prosper in the presence of the

other genes that happen to be common in the gene pool. "ifferent gene pools may

evolve towards different combinations of mutually compatible genes. ' envisage a time

when, in the same kind of way, computer viruses may evolve towards compatibilitywith other viruses, to form communities or gangs. 9ut then again, perhaps notG #t any

rate, ' find the speculation more alarming than exciting.

#t present, computer viruses don$t strictly evolve. They are invented by human

programmers, and if they evolve they do so in the same weak sense as cars or

aeroplanes evolve. "esigners derive this year$s car as a slight modification of last year$s

car, and then may, more or less consciously, continue a trend of the last few years

further flattening of the radiator grill or whatever it may be. Computer virus designers

dream up ever more devious tricks for outwitting the programmers of antivirus

software. 9ut computer viruses don$t so far mutate and evolve by true natural

selection. They may do so in the future. Whether they evolve by natural selection, orwhether their evolution is steered by human designers, may not make much difference

to their eventual performance. 9y either kind of evolution, we expect them to become

better at concealment, and we expect them to become subtly compatible with other

viruses that are at the same time prospering in the computer community.

"-# viruses and computer viruses spread for the same reason: an environment exists in

which there is machinery well set up to duplicate and spread them around and to obey

the instructions that the viruses embody. These two environments are, respectively, the

environment of cellular physiology and the environment provided by a large community

of computers and datahandling machinery. #re there any other environments like these,

any other humming paradises of replication)

" #he Infected Mind

' have already alluded to the programmedin gullibility of a child, so useful for learning

language and traditional wisdom, and so easily subverted by nuns, *oonies and their

ilk. *ore generally, we all exchange information with one another. We don$t exactly

plug floppy disks into slots in one another$s skulls, but we exchange sentences, both

through our ears and through our eyes. We notice each other$s styles of moving and

dressing and are influenced. We take in advertising !ingles, and are presumably

persuaded by them, otherwise hardheaded businessmen would not spend so muchmoney polluting the air with them.

Think about the two 8ualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of

a friendly medium,. the two 8ualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards

parasitic "-#, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These

8ualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some

mistakes that are subse8uently reproduced accurately and, secondly, a readiness to

obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.

Cellular machinery and electronic computers excel in both these virusfriendly 8ualities.

ow do human brains match up) #s faithful duplicators, they are certainly less perfect

than either cells or electronic computers. -evertheless, they are still pretty good,


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perhaps about as faithful as an (-# virus, though not as good as "-# with all its

elaborate proofreading measures against textual degradation. %vidence of the fidelity of

brains, especially child brains, as data duplicators is provided by language itself. &haw$s

rofessor iggins was able by ear alone to place ondoners in the street where they

grew up. Fiction is not evidence for anything, but everyone knows that iggins$s

fictional skill is only an exaggeration of something we can all do. #ny #merican cantell "eep &outh from *id West, -ew %ngland from illbilly. #ny -ew Aorker can tell

9ronx from 9rooklyn. %8uivalent claims could be substantiated for any country. What

this phenomenon means is that human brains are capable of pretty accurate copying

1otherwise the accents of, say, -ewcastle would not be stable enough to be recogni+ed6

but with some mistakes 1otherwise pronunciation would not evolve, and all speakers of

a language would inherit identically the same accents from their remote ancestors6.

anguage evolves, because it has both the great stability and the slight changeability

that are prere8uisites for any evolving system.

The second re8uirement of a virusfriendly environment that it should obey a

program of coded instructions is again only 8uantitatively less true for brains thanfor cells or computers. We sometimes obey orders from one another, but also we

sometimes don$t. -evertheless, it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast ma!ority

of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available

religions. 'nstructions to genuflect, to bow towards *ecca, to nod one$s head

rhythmically towards the wall, to shake like a maniac, to //speak in tongues$$ the list

of such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive

are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably high statistical probability.

ess portentously, and again especially prominent in children, the //cra+e$$ is a striking

example of behavior that owes more to epidemiology than to rational choice. Aoyos,

hula hoops and pogo sticks, with their associated behavioral fixed actions, sweep

through schools, and more sporadically leap from school to school, in patterns that

differ from a measles epidemic in no serious particular. Ten years ago, you could have

traveled thousands of miles through the ;nited &tates and never seen a baseball cap

turned back to front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubi8uitous. ' do not know what

the pattern of geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but

epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily 8ualified to study it. We

don$t have to get into arguments about //determinism$$ we don$t have to claim that

children are compelled to imitate their fellows$ hat fashions. 't is enough that their hat

wearing behavior, as a matter of fact, isstatistically affected by the hatwearing

behavior of their fellows.

Trivial though they are, cra+es provide us with yet more circumstantial evidence that

human minds, especially perhaps !uvenile ones, have the 8ualities that we have singled

out as desirable for an informational parasite. #t the very least the mind is a plausible

candidatefor infection by something like a computer virus, even if it is not 8uite such a

parasite$s dreamenvironment as a cell nucleus or an electronic computer.

't is intriguing to wonder what it might feel like, from the inside, if one$s mind were the

victim of a //virus.$$ This might be a deliberately designed parasite, like a presentday

computer virus. 7r it might be an inadvertently mutated and unconsciously evolved

parasite. %ither way, especially if the evolved parasite was the memic descendant of a


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long line of successful ancestors, we are entitled to expect the typical //mind virus$$ to

be pretty good at its !ob of getting itself successfully replicated.

rogressive evolution of more effective mindparasites will have two aspects. -ew

//mutants$$ 1either random or designed by humans6 that are better at spreading will

become more numerous. #nd there will be a ganging up of ideas that flourish in oneanother$s presence, ideas that mutually support one another !ust as genes do and as '

have speculated computer viruses may one day do. We expect that replicators will go

around together from brain to brain in mutually compatible gangs. These gangs will

come to constitute a package, which may be sufficiently stable to deserve a collective

name such as (oman Catholicism or @oodoo. 't doesn$t too much matter whether we

analogi+e the whole package to a single virus, or each one of the component parts to a

single virus. The analogy is not that precise anyway, !ust as the distinction between a

computer virus and a computer worm is nothing to get worked up about. What matters

is that minds are friendly environments to parasitic, selfreplicating ideas or

information, and that minds are typically massively infected.

ike computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to

detect. 'f you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won$t know it, and may

even vigorously deny it. #ccepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own

mind, what telltale signs might you look out for) ' shall answer by imaging how a

medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer 1arbitrarily assumed

to be male6.

1$The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that

something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn$t seem to owe anything

to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and

convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as //faith.$$

2$atients typically make a positive virtue of faith$s being strong and unshakable, in

spite ofnot being based upon evidence. 'ndeed, they may feel that the less evidence

there is, the more virtuous the belief 1see below6.

This paradoxical idea that lack of evidence is a positive virtue where faith is concerned

has something of the 8uality of a program that is selfsustaining, because it is self

referential 1see the chapter //7n @iral &entences and &elf(eplicating &tructures$$ in

ofstadter, 2346. 7nce the proposition is believed, it automatically undermines

opposition to itself. The //lack of evidence is a virtue$$ idea could be an admirablesidekick, ganging up with faith itself in a cli8ue of mutually supportive viral programs.

"$# related symptom, which a faithsufferer may also present, is the conviction that

//mystery,$$per se,is a good thing. 't is not a virtue to solve mysteries. (ather we should

en!oy them, even revel in their insolubility.

#ny impulse to solve mysteries could be serious inimical to the spread of a mind virus.

't would not, therefore, be surprising if the idea that //mysteries are better not solved$$

was a favored member of a mutually supporting gang of viruses. Take the //*ystery of

Transubstantiation.$$ 't is easy and nonmysterious to believe that in some symbolic or

metaphorical sense the eucharistic wine turns into the blood of Christ. The (omanCatholic doctrine of transubstantiation, however, claims far more. The //whole


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substance$$ of the wine is converted into the blood of Christ the appearance of wine that

remains is //merely accidental,$$ //inhering in no substance$$ 1Henny, 234=, p. D56.

Transubstantiation is collo8uially taught as meaning that the wine //literally$$ turns into

the blood of Christ. Whether in its obfuscatory #ristotelian or its franker collo8uial

form, the claim of transubstantiation can be made only if we do serious violence to the

normal meanings of words like //substance$$ and //literally.$$ (edefining words is not asin, but, if we use words like //whole substance$$ and //literally$$ for this case, what word

are we going to use when we really and truly wantto say that something did actually

happen) #s #nthony Henny observed of his own pu++lement as a young seminarian,

//For all ' could tell, my typewriter might be 9en!amin "israeli transubstantiated....$$

(oman Catholics, whose belief in infallible authority compels them to accept that wine

becomes physically transformed into blood despite all appearances, refer to the

//mystery$$ of transubstantiation. Calling it a mystery makes everything 7H, you see. #t

least, it works for a mind well prepared by background infection. %xactly the same trick

is performed in the //mystery$$ of the Trinity. *ysteries are not meant to be solved, they

are meant to strike awe. The //mystery is a virtue$$ idea comes to the aid of the Catholic,who would otherwise find intolerable the obligation to believe the obvious nonsense of

the transubstantiation and the //threeinone.$$ #gain, the belief that //mystery is a

virtue$$ has a selfreferential ring. #s ofstadter might put it, the very mysteriousness of

the belief moves the believer to perpetuate the mystery.

#n extreme symptom of //mystery is a virtue$$ infection is Tertullian$s //Certum est quia

impossibile est$$ 1't is certain because it is impossible$$6. That way madness lies. 7ne is

tempted to 8uote ewis Carroll$s White Iueen, who, in response to #lice$s //7ne can$t

believe impossible things$$ retorted //' daresay you haven$t had much practice... When '

was your age, ' always did it for halfanhour a day. Why, sometimes '$ve believed as

many as six impossible things before breakfast.$$ 7r "ouglas #dams$ %lectric *onk, a

laborsaving device programmed to do your believing for you, which was capable of

//believing things they$d have difficulty believing in &alt ake City$$ and which, at the

moment of being introduced to the reader, believed, contrary to all the evidence, that

everything in the world was a uniform shade of pink. 9ut White Iueens and %lectric

*onks become less funny when you reali+e that these virtuoso believers are

indistinguishable from revered theologians in real life. //'t is by all means to be

believed, because it is absurd$$ 1Tertullian again6. &ir Thomas 9rowne 12=?6 8uotes

Tertullian with approval, and goes further: //*ethinks there be not impossibilities

enough in religion for an active faith.$$ #nd //' desire to exercise my faith in the

difficultest point for to credit ordinary and visible ob!ects is not faith, but perswasionJsicK.$$

' have the feeling that something more interesting is going on here than !ust plain

insanity or surrealist nonsense, something akin to the admiration we feel when we watch

a tenball !uggler on a tightrope. 't is as though the faithful gain prestige through

managing to believe even more impossible things than their rivals succeed in believing.

#re these people testing exercising their believing muscles, training themselves to

believe impossible things so that they can take in their stride the merely improbable

things that they are ordinarily called upon to believe)

While ' was writing this, the Guardian10uly 53, 23326 fortuitously carried a beautifulexample. 't came in an interview with a rabbi undertaking the bi+arre task of vetting the


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kosherpurity of food products right back to the ultimate origins of their minutest

ingredients. e was currently agoni+ing over whether to go all the way to China to

scrutini+e the menthol that goes into cough sweets. //ave you ever tried checking

Chinese menthol... it was extremely difficult, especially since the first letter we sent

received the reply in best Chinese %nglish, /The product contains no kosher$... China has

only recently started opening up to kosher investigators. The menthol should be 7H, butyou can never be absolutely sure unless you visit.$$ These kosher investigators run a

telephone hotline on which uptotheminute redalerts of suspicion are recorded

against chocolate bars and codliver oil. The rabbi sighs that the greeninspired trend

away from artificial colors and flavors //makes life miserable in the kosher field

because you have to follow all these things back.$$ When the interviewer asks him why

he bothers with this obviously pointless exercise, he makes it very clear that the point is

precisely that there isno point:

That most of the Hashrut laws are divine ordinances without reason

given is 2>> per cent the point. 't is very easy not to murder people. @ery

easy. 't is a little bit harder not to steal because one is temptedoccasionally. &o that is no great proof that ' believe in Eod or am

fulfilling is will. 9ut, if e tells me not to have a cup of coffee with

milk in it with my mincemeat and peaces at lunchtime, that is a test. The

only reason ' am doing that is because ' have been told to so do. 't is

something difficult.

elena Cronin has suggested to me that there may be an analogy here to Lahavi$s

handicap theory of sexual selection and the evolution of signals 1Lahavi, 23D6. ong

unfashionable, even ridiculed 1"awkins, 23D=6, Lahavi$s theory has recently been

cleverly rehabilitated 1Erafen, 233> a, b6 and is now taken seriously by evolutionary

biologists 1"awkins, 23436. Lahavi suggests that peacocks, for instance, evolve their

absurdly burdensome fans with their ridiculously conspicuous 1to predators6 colors,

precisely becausethey are burdensome and dangerous, and therefore impressive to

females. The peacock is, in effect, saying: //ook how fit and strong ' must be, since '

can afford to carry around this preposterous tail.$$

To avoid misunderstanding of the sub!ective language in which Lahavi likes to make his

points, ' should add that the biologist$s convention of personifying the unconscious

actions of natural selection is taken for granted here. Erafen has translated the argument

into an orthodox "arwinian mathematical model, and it works. -o claim is here being

made about the intentionality or awareness of peacocks and peahens. They can be assphexish or as intentional as you please 1"ennett, 234?, 234


11/15

#ny wimp in religion could believe that breadsymbolicallyrepresents the body of

Christ, but it takes a real, redblooded Catholic to believe something as daft as the

transubstantiation. 'f you believe that you can believe anything, and 1witness the story

of "oubting Thomas6 these people are trained to see that as a virtue.

et us return to our list of symptoms that someone afflicted with the mental virus offaith, and its accompanying gang of secondary infections, may expect to experience.

%$The sufferer may find himself behaving intolerantly towards vectors of rival faiths, in

extreme cases even killing them or advocating their deaths. e may be similarly violent

in his disposition towards apostates 1people who once held the faith but have renounced

it6 or towards heretics 1people who espouse a different often, perhaps significantly,

only very slightly different version of the faith6. e may also feel hostile towards

other modes of thought that are potentially inimical to his faith, such as the method of

scientific reason which may function rather like a piece of antiviral software.

The threat to kill the distinguished novelist &alman (ushdie is only the latest in a longline of sad examples. 7n the very day that ' wrote this, the 0apanese translator of The

Satanic Verseswas found murdered, a week after a nearfatal attack on the 'talian

translator of the same book. 9y the way, the apparently opposite symptom of

//sympathy$$ for *uslim //hurt,$$ voiced by the #rchbishop of Canterbury and other

Christian leaders 1verging, in the case of the @atican, on outright criminal complicity6

is, of course, a manifestation of the symptom we discussed earlier: the delusion that

faith, however obnoxious its results, has to be respected simply because it isfaith.

*urder is an extreme, of course. 9ut there is an even more extreme symptom, and that

is suicide in the militant service of a faith. ike a soldier ant programmed to sacrifice

her life for germline copies of the genes that did the programming, a young #rab or

0apanese J))GK is taught that to die in a holy war is the 8uickest way to heaven. Whether

the leaders who exploit him really believe this does not diminish the brutal power that

the //suicide mission virus$$ wields on behalf of the faith. 7f course suicide, like murder,

is a mixed blessing: wouldbe converts may be repelled, or may treat with contempt a

faith that is perceived as insecure enough to need such tactics.

*ore obviously, if too many individuals sacrifice themselves the supply of believers

could run low. This was true of a notorious example of faithinspired suicide, though in

this case it was not //kamika+e$$ death in battle. The eoples$ Temple sect became

extinct when its leader, the (everend 0im 0ones, led the bulk of his followers from the;nited &tates to the romised and of //0onestown$$ in the Euyanan !ungle where he

persuaded more than 3>> of them, children first, to drink cyanide. The macabre affair

was fully investigated by a team from the San Francisco Chronicle1Hilduff and 0avers,

23D46.

0ones, //the Father,$$ had called his flock together and told them it was

time to depart for heaven.

//We$re going to meet,$$ he promised, //in another place.$$

The words kept coming over the camp$s loudspeakers.

//There is great dignity in dying. 't is a great demonstration for everyone

to die.$$


12/15

'ncidentally, it does not escape the trained mind of the alert sociobiologist that 0ones,

within his sect in earlier days, //proclaimed himself the only person permitted to have

sex$$ 1presumably his partners were also permitted6. //# secretary would arrange for

0ones$s liaisons. &he would call up and say, /Father hates to do this, but he has this

tremendous urge and could you please...)$ $$ is victims were not only female. 7ne 2D

yearold male follower, from the days when 0ones$s community was still in &anFrancisco, told how he was taken for dirty weekends to a hotel where 0ones received a

//minister$s discount for (ev. 0im 0ones and son.$$ The same boy said: //' was really in

awe of him. e was more than a father. ' would have killed my parents for him.$$ What

is remarkable about the (everend 0im 0ones is not his own selfserving behavior but the

almost superhuman gullibility of his followers. Eiven such prodigious credulity, can

anyone doubt that human minds are ripe for malignant infection)

#dmittedly, the (everend 0ones conned only a few thousand people. 9ut his case is an

extreme, the tip of an iceberg. The same eagerness to be conned by religious leaders is

widespread. *ost of us would have been prepared to bet that nobody could get away

with going on television and saying, in all but so many words, //&end me your money,so that ' can use it to persuade other suckers to send me their money too.$$ Aet today, in

every ma!or conurbation in the ;nited &tates, you can find at least one television

evangelist channel entirely devoted to this transparent confidence trick. #nd they get

away with it in sackfuls. Faced with suckerdom on this awesome scale, it is hard not to

feel a grudging sympathy with the shinysuited conmen. ;ntil you reali+e that not all

the suckers are rich, and that it is often widows$ mites on which the evangelists are

growing fat. ' have even heard one of them explicitly invoking the principle that ' now

identify with Lahavi$s principle of costly authentication. Eod really appreciates a

donation, he said with passionate sincerity, only when that donation is so large that it

hurts. %lderly paupers were wheeled on to testify how much happier they felt since they

had made over their little all to the (everend whoever it was.

&$The patient may notice that the particular convictions that he holds, while having

nothing to do with evidence, do seem to owe a great deal to epidemiology. Why, he may

wonder, do ' hold thisset of convictions rather than thatset) 's it because ' surveyed all

the world$s faiths and chose the one whose claims seemed most convincing) #lmost

certainly not. 'f you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the

same faith as your parents and grandparents had. -o doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring

music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. 9ut by far the most important variable

determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so

passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory,set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.

%pidemiology, not evidence.

'$'f the patient is one of the rare exceptions who follows a different religion from his

parents, the explanation may still be epidemiological. To be sure, it ispossiblethat he

dispassionately surveyed the world$s faiths and chose the most convincing one. 9ut it is

statistically more probable that he has been exposed to a particularly potent infective

agent a 0ohn Wesley, a 0im 0ones or a &t. aul. ere we are talking about hori+ontal

transmission, as in measles. 9efore, the epidemiology was that of vertical transmission,

as in untington$s Chorea.


13/15

($The internal sensations of the patient may be startlingly reminiscent of those more

ordinarily associated with sexual love. This is an extremely potent force in the brain,

and it is not surprising that some viruses have evolved to exploit it. &t. Teresa of #vila$s

famously orgasmic vision is too notorious to need 8uoting again. *ore seriously, and on

a less crudely sensual plane, the philosopher #nthony Henny provides moving

testimony to the pure delight that awaits those that manage to believe in the mystery oftransubstantiation. #fter describing his ordination as a (oman Catholic priest,

empowered by laying on of hands to celebrate *ass, he goes on that he vividly recalls

the exaltation of the first months during which ' had the power to say

*ass. -ormally a slow and sluggish riser, ' would leap early out of bed,

fully awake and full of excitement at the thought of the momentous act '

was privileged to perform. ' rarely said the public Community *ass:

most days ' celebrated alone at a side altar with a !unior member of the

College to serve as acolyte and congregation. 9ut that made no

difference to the solemnity of the sacrifice or the validity of the

consecration.'t was touching the body of Christ, the closeness of the priest to 0esus,

which most enthralled me. ' would ga+e on the ost after the words of

consecration, softeyed like a lover looking into the eyes of his beloved...

Those early days as a priest remain in my memory as days of fulfilment

and tremulous happiness something precious, and yet too fragile to last,

like a romantic loveaffair brought up short by the reality of an ill

assorted marriage. 1Henny, 234=, pp. 2>256

"r. Henny is affectingly believable that it felt to him, as a young priest, as though he

was in love with the consecrated host. What a brilliantly successful virusG 7n the same

page, incidentally, Henny also shows us that the virus is transmitted contagiously if

not literally then at least in some sense from the palm of the infecting bishop$s hand

through the top of the new priest$s head:

'f Catholic doctrine is true, every priest validly ordained derives his

orders in an unbroken line of laying on of hands, through the bishop who

ordains him, back to one of the twelve #postles... there must be

centurieslong, recorded chains of layings on of hands. 't surprises me

that priests never seem to trouble to trace their spiritual ancestry in this

way, finding out who ordained their bishop, and who ordained him, and

so on to 0ulius '' or Celestine @ or ildebrand, or Eregory the Ereat,perhaps. 1Henny, 234=, p. 2>26

't surprises me, too.

% Is )cience a Virus

-o. -ot unless all computer programs are viruses. Eood, useful programs spread

because people evaluate them, recommend them and pass them on. Computer viruses

spread solely because they embody the coded instructions: //&pread me.$$ &cientific

ideas, like all memes, are sub!ect to a kind of natural selection, and this might look

superficially viruslike. 9ut the selective forces that scrutini+e scientific ideas are not

arbitrary and capricious. They are exacting, wellhoned rules, and they do not favor


14/15

pointless selfserving behavior. They favor all the virtues laid out in textbooks of

standard methodology: testability, evidential support, precision, 8uantifiability,

consistency, intersub!ectivity, repeatability, universality, progressiveness, independence

of cultural milieu, and so on. Faith spreads despite a total lack of every single one of

these virtues.

Aou may find elements of epidemiology in the spread of scientific ideas, but it will be

largely descriptive epidemiology. The rapid spread of a good idea through the scientific

community may even look like a description of a measles epidemic. 9ut when you

examine the underlying reasons you find that they are good ones, satisfying the

demanding standards of scientific method. 'n the history of the spread of faith you will

find little else but epidemiology, and causal epidemiology at that. The reason why

person # believes one thing and 9 believes another is simply and solely that # was born

on one continent and 9 on another. Testability, evidential support and the rest aren$t

even remotely considered. For scientific belief, epidemiology merely comes along

afterwards and describes the history of its acceptance. For religious belief,

epidemiology is the root cause.

& Epiloue

appily, viruses don$t win every time. *any children emerge unscathed from the worst

that nuns and mullahs can throw at them. #nthony Henny$s own story has a happy

ending. e eventually renounced his orders because he could no longer tolerate the

obvious contradictions within Catholic belief, and he is now a highly respected scholar.

9ut one cannot help remarking that it must be a powerful infection indeed that took a

man of his wisdom and intelligence resident of the 9ritish #cademy, no less

three decades to fight off. #m ' unduly alarmist to fear for the soul of my sixyearoldinnocent)

*cknowledement

With thanks to elena Cronin for detailed suggestion on content and style on every

page.

References

9rowne, &ir T. 12=?6eligio !edici,', 3

"awkins, (. 123D=6 The Selfish Gene"7xford: 7xford ;niversity ress."awkins, (. 123456 The Extended #henotype"7xford: W. . Freeman.

"awkins, (. 123436 The Selfish Gene,5nd edn. 7xford: 7xford ;niversity ress.

"ennett, ". C. 1234?6 'ntentional systems in cognitive ethology: the //anglossian

paradigm$$ defended.$eha%ioral and $rain Sciences,'+?


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ofstadter, ". (. 12346!etamagical Themas"armondsworth: enguin.

Henny, #. 1234=6) #ath from ome7xford: 7xford ;niversity ress.

Hilduff, *. and 0avers, (. 123D46 The Suicide Cult"-ew Aork: 9antam.

Thimbleby, . 123326 Can viruses ever be useful) Computers and Security,1-+2222>2 1thanks to *itch orter, &teve

9liss, (ichard &mith, 9rendan alor and %ric *eyer for typo warnings6 JC(&K
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/

Documents

Viruses of the Mind by R.dawkins